Re: Feature request: Fix cascading error messages

[David Kastrup]

Martín Rincón Botero <martinrinconbotero@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm lucky to be able to work using Lilypond through Python. I never
> compile the whole score I'm working on, but only the current "segment"
> (around 2 pages) and the corresponding pages get updated in the
> PDF. Compiling the whole thing is something I do only at the end of a
> project because it's so slow (I believe TeX suffers from similar
> problems, so mentioning TeX doesn't really improve the situation).

TeX was written to make efficient use of computers with a power that
would be considered absolutely ridiculously impaired by today's
standards, so it tends to be amazingly blazingly fast.

Any differing impression most likely due is to abusing TeX as a Turing
machine for solving more or less generic programming purposes rather
than as a typesetting engine with a basic macro layer.

Since TeX is predominantly employed for compiling LaTeX sources, that
speaks more about the LaTeX implementation than TeX itself.

To wit: in ancient times, using \tracingall for looking at how a
document got compiled tended to deliver useful information; nowadays it
just puts out indecipherable riffraff, like using gdb for tracing the
progress of a Scheme interpreter does.

A Texinfo rather than LaTeX compilation is probably more in line with
the expected performance (at least for input not transcending the ASCII
input plane of Unicode) but no promises: the old adage "any improvements
in hardware performance will get eaten up by more waste in programming"
is a universal phenomenon.

-- 
David Kastrup